Love Sick by Dr. Frank Tallis Dr. Love as a Mental Illness

Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses, superstitious or ritualistic compulsions, delusion, the inability to concentrate—exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of a major depressive episode. Yet we all subconsciously welcome these symptoms when we allow ourselves to fall in love. In Love Sick, Dr. Frank Tallis, a leading authority on obsessive disorders, considers our experiences and expressions of love, and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterize what we mean when we speak of falling in love. Tallis examines why the agony associated with romantic love continues to be such a popular subject for poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, and questions just how healthy our attitudes are and whether there may in fact be more sane, less tortured ways to love. A highly informative exploration of how, throughout time, principally in the West, the symptoms of mental illness have been used to describe the state of being in love, this book offers an eloquent, thought-provoking, and endlessly illuminating look at one of the most important aspects of human behavior.

Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist and the author of six books on psychology, obsession, and the mind, as well as many novels, has worked at the Institute of Psychiatry and King s College, London. He won the New London Writers Award in 2000. He lives in London.

BC Books

Examiner

Kind of kept me from really considering that while love does serve a biological and instinctual purpouse, and provide a strong sense of fullfillment, it can also seriously damage some people mentally for a long time.